Family: It's what's for dinner to cannibal animals

Maybe it was from writing the last post about music or maybe from hunting down good 80's songs to use for karaoke but I just realized that there was a weird spike in cannibal-inspired music in that decade. There was the band Fine Young Cannibals, memorable for a nice-looking, adenoidal soprano male lead songer and the hit She Drives Me Crazy and Total Coelo and their hit I Eat Cannibal, memorable for the trash bag outfits in their video. Other decades spawned more cannibal stories, real and otherwise, but at no other time did anyone seem to feel a need to put it to music.

For animals cannibalism isn't all that aberrant. Lots of them do it, some of which I've listed in The Flesheaters: 5 Cannibalistic Animals on National Geographic.

There were a couple of animals who are known to practice cannibalism that I left out - the chimp and the bonobo. The incidence of cannibalism is, from what I've read, not all that common in these apes and I was focusing on animals who practice it more routinely. The blacktail prairie dog for instance: according to prairie dog expert John Hoogland (quoted in the story) there is a 39% chance a blacktail prairie dog litter will die due to the cannibalistic behavior of its female relatives.

And you thought you had reason to avoid family dinners.